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School for Advanced Corporealology: The place to go for disillusioned
etherealists.

The Delirica

Darkness falls one snuffed out candle at a time:Journalist
Ruqia Hassan murdered by Isis after writing on life in Raqqa “Activists
confirm 30-year-old was killed in September having been accused by Islamic
State of spying for rival Syrian groups.” By the time people take
notice, it will be too late. I can already see the darkness coming. The eclipse
will be total, and long.

The presidents of various nations
issued condemnations heard around their heads. You want your condemnations to
mean something: defeat IS and Assad, and sanction Iran; perhaps then, you'll be
taken seriously. Obama's policies, even if right, are perceived as a sign of
weakness by many; that perception alone is a conflict driver and will lead to multiple
challenges in the future. This is not some Monday night quarterbacking; this
has been a contention of mine for years.

*

During the last few years, the
Assad regime, Iran, Russia, North Korea and terrorists groups like Al-Qaeda, the
Islamic State and Boko Haram amply demonstrated how impunity and mass systematic
cruelty can actually work in helping one achieve some of its goals, at least,
and to escape the consequences of their actions. The demonstration, however,
would not have been possible had the behavior of these actors not been met with
tergiversations, indifference, continuous handwringing and a never ending Shirk& Shift routine by the U.S. and other Western governments.

Unless we choose to change our
response to these bad actors, and our current strategies for managing the Syrian
conflict in particular, Russia and Co. will get more defiant and will inspire more
imitators, and we will witness more conflicts and more impunity all around the
world, and it will not be long before we begin feeling the impact at home. Nothing
is containable anymore. If we see it, hear it, feel it, sense it, think it,
dream it, then, we will be affected by it. This is the essence of our
hyper-connectivity. Eventually, there will be consequences, for all. The problem,
however, is that when we leave it to Fate to decide outcomes on such critical
issues and on such a grand-scale, we all lose. Fate is never kind to those who
choose to tempt it.

Syria's
schools feel blast of Russia war planes “Schools closed until
further notice in Douma, Syria, after reportedly cluster bomb attack from
Russian planes.” Talk about a cluster fuck! The only tool for killing
that has not been used against Syria’s children by now is nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, Assad
will outlast Obama in office, just as Saddam outlasted George Bush. But this
time, the impact of this dictator’s survival will haunt us for years to come. Impunity
triumphant is impunity unforgiven. Ours is not Justice deferred, or denied, it’s
justice completely set aside, forgotten and deleted from lexicon.

Iran's
failed cultural diplomacy in Syria “This idea of the Arabs without culture is
widespread in Iran,” Von Maltzahn told Tehran Bureau. “But Iranians can have a
particular image in Syria too, because Syrians see a certain group
[conservative Iranians] on a particular mission, that is religious pilgrimage.
This is building new stereotypes that are not entirely representative. So I was
interested in what the two states were doing on the cultural level, how they
were working on their image.” This bit is actually relevant to the discussion
of the Saudi-Iranian conflict in the previous edition of DDGD. The issue of racist
attitudes prevalent among Arabs and Persians vis-à-vis each other flies against
the thinking by some people that, somehow, Iran can play a stabilizing role in
the region. Such thinking is completely divorced from reality, but it doesn’t
seem to be meant to connect with reality. Its primary use seems to merely to justify
a policy whose makers are either completely unconcerned about the future of the
Middle East, or whose immediate goal is to help create more instability in it allowing
Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to get sucked in and pulled apart. And
fools do rush in.

Saudaran
& the Global Devolution:After Executing
Regime Critic, Saudi Arabia Fires Up American PR Machine. Actually, we have
been living in a reality created by Iran’s PR machines and their supporters and
incarnation, such as NIAC and the people behind the Iran Project, for years
now. While some articles advising sticking with Saudi Arabia as an old ally has
been published over the last five years, the same period witnessed a dizzying
number of op-eds published in serious news outlets such as the New York Times
and the Financial Times, all advocating rapprochement with Iran in general,
then, the switched to supporting the Iran Deal, and soon later, criticizing
Saudi Arabia for behavior and practices no different those currently perpetrated
by Iran. Finally, now they openly advocate standing with Iran against Saudi
Arabia in a future showdown.

The reasons being offered for the
switch makes absolutely no sense as Iran is even more overtly engaged in troubling
behavior all around the region. There is indeed a hidden ideological agenda
here, one that is in line with how certain groups envision future developments in
the region and the world over the next few decades.

No, I am not proposing a
conspiracy theory here, what I am suggesting is this: it has long been
customary for various American think tanks and research centers, some acting
with partial funding from the U.S. governments, others from relying on their endowments
or private funding, to draw up potential scenarios for future developments in
regions around the world. Over the course of decades of organizing events and
drawing up such scenarios in regard to the Middle East, a school of thought
emerged that basically contended that America’s interests will be served better
in the 21st century through improving and normalizing its relations
with Iran as a new regional power in the Middle East, while decreasing reliance
on Israel, and completely abandoning the GCC, Egypt, and even NATO’s ally
Turkey. In fact, according to this school, relations with Western Europe
themselves might need to be drastically overhauled in favor of an envisioned
alliance with China. While there is nothing wrong in bringing countries such as
Iran and China from the cold, there is a definite problem in thinking that that
could only be done if certain norms regarding human rights and democratic
values are abandoned, and the stability of entire regions is sacrificed. Why? Because
the price of standing up for these norms as well as peace and stability is
deemed by this lot to be too high. Such calculations are exactly what promises
to make the 21st Century the bloodiest in history.

But, considering that President
Obama’s foreign policies have been quite in line with this thinking, then, we
simply cannot accept anything to change for the remainder of his presidency,
irrespective of any humanitarian toll, and how and Iranian and Russian behavior
could get. His legacy is already sealed, I am afraid. The bigger problem is
that the thinking behind it will still be with us for long after he is no
longer Lord of the Manor on Pennsylvania Avenue.

To the interesting speech in the video
below, I would rush to add that the cultural of global corporatism is not only
a Western phenomenon; corporations in China, Russia, Iran, India, Brazil and Japan,
to name but a few countries, are playing by the same rulebook at this stage. Moreover,
most of these countries are ruled by illiberal forces whose behavior at home and
abroad is far more problematic than that of Western democracies. For theirs is
a disdain for democracy its values, and not simply a democracy in crisis. For this,
the traditional solutions proposed by the Left don't work here, because they
only see evil in the West, and their local solutions for the problem often empower
the other side, which is no less guilty of the same greedy behavior with the
added problem of authoritarian values. Worse. The traditional left often sees liberal
prodemocracy activists in these troubling countries as stooges, has little
sympathy for their causes, and they tend to lend a measure of sympathy they
lend it to Islamists and other atavistic forces, in the name of authenticity. But
the greed of the elite, their conflicts and their less celebrated coordination
on some issues, represent a global problem and a global menace, and cannot be
truly resisted through such narrow and highly ideological focus. This tendency endangers
democracy at home, and makes its chances of spreading and meeting the
expectations of more people abroad close to nil. We need to examine this
phenomenon of corporatist supremacy beyond nationalism and geography; otherwise
our solutions will be self-defeating.

Local Activist: Hi son, what’s your problem?

Boy: I want to tell you something, but I feel
ashamed.

Local Activist: No please, go ahead.

Boy: We haven’t eaten anything for the last three
days, can you give us something to eat, for my little siblings? Just for today?
If you can?

Local Activist: God help us! Son, what if I told you
that I don’t have anything to eat myself?

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